There is no better material for a plumber to do a good lasting job in drinkable water lines than copper. There are several materials available in the market to work with water lines, but copper is stronger, relatively cheap, reliable, long lasting, easy to work and safe for your health. I am a plumber by trade and I have worked with a wide variety of materials. In my humble opinion, copper is the best.
To use copper you must solder all joints between connecting pipes. Not long ago the soldering part was the most difficult and time-consuming part. In any copper job to make a good solder, the pipe and the fittings (used to join the connecting pipes) must be clean. You must flux them, heat the fitting and when it is hot enough, feed the solder around the joint.
In the past in order to do all this, you had to bring with you:
1. Sandpaper (to clean fitting and pipe ends);
2. Gas tank with its torch (used to be very heavy);
3. Striker or matches, lighter, or whatever was available to ignite the torch;
4. Flux, and
5. Solder.
Nowadays there are a wide variety of products in the market that will make a brother plumber""s work a lot easier, which I call 21st century tools. To start soldering a new job, you must clean both fittings and pipe ends. Sandpaper was not the easiest way, because it had some inconveniences like:
1. It wouldn""t work when wet (and you cannot ask us plumbers to keep our tools dry when water is primarily what we work with);
2. It was very difficult for a grown man""s finger to fit into a xc2xd inch diameter fitting with sandpaper to clean it; and
3. It was also very difficult to clean a pipe of fitting when hot.
Today there are stiff wire brushes that can be used to clean the inside and outside of pipes and fittings. These brushes avoid the problems associated with sandpaper.
Then we had the problem of the tank torch and striker;
1. The tank was too big and heavy.
2. The torch had no striker.
Today there are some patented torches supplied Benz-O-Matic that have a built-in striker that will fit into a 1 lb. propane tank. This will make it much more portable and comfortable. These torches are marked with U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,526,532; 4,666,398, and 4,954,076, which I would like to include as part of my detailed description below.
Also, there is a tool from Ridgid that works with electricity. This tool is a torch that will heat the fitting in 16 seconds. They claim it will solder with water in the line something that it couldn""t be done with conventional torches, though I have not yet tried it myself.
All these gadgets are very good ideas and they really are 21st century tools. Still, there are some details that we have overlooked. The wire brush and the torch is a great combination, but we still have to do something with the solder and the flux. The inconvenience of fluxing and feeding the solder was that it had to be done manually. The flux is an acid and it is not a pleasant sensation on your hand, body or clothes. If you ask a brother plumber which part he does not like about soldering, many of them will tell you fluxing fittings and pipes.
As far as the solder is concerned, the same thing will happen. To unroll the solder you must put down the torch and use both hands to unroll it. Some times you forget it is hot and might get burned. Some other times just when the fitting is hot, you can find neither flux nor solder, and then you realize that you left them at the previous working spot.
Thinking of all this, I came up with an idea that will solve these hazards. The concept basically involves fitting the flux and solder in a container that by means of different mechanisms, will feed the flux, solder, or both at the same time and also could be refilled. I believe this idea will benefit many people by making the task easy and safe.